Conspiriacy requires forethought and concensus and I don't believe that we've thought about anything we have ever done, much less agreed on it.

Monday, March 02, 2015

Consolidating resources and Expanding Thoughts

First of all if you haven't seen this yet Joel Kallman has started an Official Apex group on Linkedin. In less than a week the membership has ballooned from 15 (when I joined) to just under 400. The group was created with the express thought of consolidating the APEX contributors on Linkedin and to keep the content to the point of tech and discussions that relate directly to APEX. This brought me into an inventive mode this weekend and I finally had something technical to go with a previous post HERE.

So if you are interested in APEX and would like another really good resource, go to linkedin.com and join the "Oracle Application Express (APEX) - The Official Group".

In the previous post "Lessons of Locks, Keys and Screwdrivers", I was playing with the idea of Virtual Columns. As it turns out the new Linkedin group produced a discussion on how to audit the data viewed by an interactive report. There are a lot of methods available and many showed up here and all seem like very good prospects. Since this was a line I was already on you can guess where I was leaning towards. The discussion got me to look back at this work and focus it to just that. The result is a set of code that can prove the point that the virtual column is indeed as useful as I had thought and more so. I have posted the DDL and function below for the linkedin discussion, but my point here is that this is just one case where security ( in this case an audit) can be implemented at a sufficiently low level as to prevent or detect data usage not just change.

(One note here is that when creating the table with the virtual column you need to use a very basic calculation first and then altering the column to use your new function.)